


Shadow of the barbed wire

by GwenCassandra



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Dachau, M/M, World War II
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-04
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-11-23 14:14:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/623061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GwenCassandra/pseuds/GwenCassandra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1941 - Dachau<br/>"When you get to Dachau, it does not matter which symbol you have on your chest – every single deported has to pass through the same free tour, made of twenty-five beatings. There is not a reason, just like everything else in and outside the camp."<br/>Harry is a pink triangle who does not want to give up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

When you get to Dachau, it does not matter which symbol you have on your chest – every single deported has to pass through the same free tour, made of twenty-five beatings.(1) There is not a reason, just like everything else in and outside the camp: with a little commitment, I would say it is like an overture, written to make them understand the whole symphony, in which the SS have fun with their rotten and broken musical instruments.  
When a new cargo of human beings arrives at the camp, the pleasure of the first beating is always for the Officer Malfois(2): probably, to remember the orchestra who is the conductor.  
But not today: there won’t be beating or shouting, orders or sound of people walking on the snow.  
Every single instrument has to be quiet, the conductor has closed the lectern: blood of his blood died – even the wood of the barracks and the train tracks have to take part in this silence.  
An unusual last requiem.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (1)The rules of the camp really required this senseless punishment, to every new deported.  
> (2)I had to change the name “Malfoy” into “Malfois”, for a matter of historical adequacy: this way, I can trace the origins of Malfoy family to France. Indeed, it has to be pronounced /Malfwa/.  
> The real Officer in Dachau in 1941 was Alexander Piorkowski, and I swear, I wish I could keep it but I need him to be Lucius for the story pourpose.


	2. First chapter

Everything, at Dachau, makes some noise: there is not a quiet place, once you cross the Arbeit macht frei.  
Down the main street, in a gray building with peeling walls, the prisoners beat iron with their bare hands; turning left, there is the chipping house, where they build beds and doors for the blocks; twenty meters along, there is the stone square: no one would ever choose it. The stone square can drive you crazy, everyone knows it: they smash stones with other stones, til they don’t have any stone left to smash or to be smashed – and then, they pile them up, right next the Block 6, and wait for the next load. Nobody knows why and nobody asks – nobody has the right to do it, at Dachau.  
Harry, instead, asked himself a few things: truth be told, he asked himself too many things, since he arrived.  
Harry needs something to keep him alive, to keep him away from thinking about his cold hands and people dying right next to him. He needs something to keep his mind sane.  
Harry needs a distraction and he can’t help but to find it in that world: because Dachau sinks in your mind, there is nothing else.  
He cannot think about his own home, he cannot distract himself thinking about what kind of flowers his mother has collected on Sunday morning or about how his best friend’s class is going – because those things do not exist anymore.  
This is the only distraction he was able to find: to analyze behaviors, to find a reason to something that simply does not have one.  
It’s exhausting – and sometimes, just when his mind gets weak, his body revitalizes. That’s when he starts smashing rocks with more energy: in the worst days, he was able to smash and carry more rocks than three people together.  
Today is one of those days: there are no questions, no thoughts.  
Today is one of those days when the number, inked on his arm, burns and the pink triangle’s stitching seem to pierce his own skin.  
The sound of the wooden clocks on the snow is constant and rhythmic – Harry just started his distraction by distraction march.  
It’s this sound that really catches Officer Malfois’ attention: he never saw someone working this hard – not in the stone square, at least.  
“Arschficker!”(1) It echoes all over the camp, but nobody really cares – men are still carrying stones, iron is still getting beaten and in the chipping house, the sound of wood saws and sandpaper doesn’t stop.  
“Yes, sir.” Upright position of the body, hands beside your hips and gaze.  
“This is your last day here. I’ll talk to your Kapo – the Officer Building is covered with snow. You’ll have to melt it with your hands, did you understand, Archsficker?”  
There is no need to answer, of course. Not understanding is considered as a dismissive attitude, and he doesn’t really want to spend eight days locked in a cell and get twenty-five beatings.(2)  
Melting snow with bare hands is a classic job, for an Archfsficker: homosexual prisoners are considered as weak – the hardest jobs are always kept for them, hoping for them to men them up, or to kill them – and in this case, it’s just the law of nature doing its job. 

It’s 7 pm, working is over: the path is already full of men from the chipping house and laborers, for the second roll call.  
In 90 minutes or so, they’ll get the mess, and he is more than sure that his Kapo will leave him the last part of it, today.(3) The Officer Malfois always keeps his word, so his Kapo probably already knows about him changing his job.  
He is not a cruel Kapo, like the others – he used to be a Navy doctor, he ended up here for flirting with the wrong guy – and he knows perfectly how men working with the snow need to eat to keep themselves alive. 

At 20.27, the last dipper of soup is poured in his bowl: it’s not a big deal, but at least, today he can see what kind of vegetables they put in it.  
“64389000 (4), come here!” Here’s another thing he likes about being in his own block: nobody calls him “Arschficker”, because they all are. He doesn’t really mind being called by his number, he kind of got used to it. Four weeks ago, during a silent night, he ended up thinking about his name.  
He just couldn’t remember the last moment he heard it. Who said it the last time? What were they talking about? Was it “Harry” or “Henry”?  
After an exhausting night spent thinking – which was followed by a more exhausting day working hard – he decided that he would have never thought about his name again. In the end, why doing it? He was just a machine, an automaton with a serial number.  
“64389000, remember just one thing: do not walk in the snow. You can survive with frozen hands but not feet. Dig a hole, or keep out of it, or whatever. You just have to keep your feet out of the snow, unless you’d like to die in a few days. Now disappear.”  
Doctor Haas can be a little rough but he’s a good man – better than the others, for sure.

The alarm time is at 5.15 during the winter months – even if there is not much difference with the 4.45 of the summer ones. It all comes from a regularized conception of chaos. The regulation is full of senseless rules like this.  
They say that it’s useful to make the most of sunlight but it’s not true – there is the same amount of it.  
The regulation of Dachau was written with the only purpose to give barbarity a lawfulness.  
Right after waking up, the prisoners have to gather in the path, for the call. The cold November wind gets through the flesh and their legs are not able to handle the weight of the hooves they are wearing.  
The call in the morning usually looks like a corpses reunion: everyone just woke up and they can’t wait to eat the morning mess, but they can’t eat until every prisoner has been called. It’s a torture planned with the only purpose of making them suffer. They cannot move because they need food to warm themselves but they cannot eat until everyone is there – a cruel paradox.  
This morning, the mess is just one slice of dry bread and Harry decides not to eat it – he perfectly knows how people working with the snow is usually not able to get in the block on time to the lunch mess. So he decides to hide it in the shirt and eat it with small bites during the day, when the SS have their patrol turn and he has 15 minutes before they come back.

When he gets in front of the Officer’s building, he takes a deep breath and his lungs froze for a moment: it’s a strange view, almost unreal.  
The building does not look at all like the other buildings in the camp – like blocks or working houses. Actually, it does not look like anything he had ever seen in his life.  
It’s a neo-Baroque three-storey building, built in 1800 and it’s the main reason for the camp to be built there: building it around a pre-existing building meant less money to be spent and less work to be done.  
In the last century, it had been the house of a painter – whose name seems to be forgotten by everybody – and whose last will was to give everything he had to the Reich. 

It’s 7 am and the ring bells: eleven hours of work had just started.  
In just eleven hours, Harry will be cold, tired – the chilblains on his hands will be unbearable and the wooden hooves will be full of snow – but he will not care about it. 

In eleven hours he’ll have a new distraction, far away from rules, rocks and stones but Harry does not know it yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (1)Before the pink triangle, the gay prisoners wore a bracelet with an “A” on it, from Arshficker, “sodomite”.  
> (2) Rule n. 1 of paragraph 6 said that everyone who had a ironic behavior, who refused to salute the SS or anyway showed them not to be in complete submissione, deserved 25 beatings and 8 days of prison.  
> (3) The last part of the mess was considered the most nutritious, because at the top of it, there was just water.  
> (4) I tried but I was not able to find a real record of the people in Dachau and their numbers, so I had to invent it and make it up myself.


	3. Second chapter

It’s been a week since he started to work for the Officer and, even if it was totally unexpected, he misses the Stone Square. There is always the sunlight there, there is someone to talk to when the SS start their patrol and the hand blisters are sweet compared to the chilblains. He is also now completely without nails – the last one fell that morning – and without company: there is a little amount of snow now and it would not make any sense to take workers away from the chipping house or the iron building. The presence of sunlight may seem a little irrelevant, with all that snow covering his hooves but believe it, even the smallest ray of sunlight can make a difference.   
The Officer building in quite high and it faces west: the only moment in which Harry can feel the sun on his skin is at noon – while he tries to get in the block in time for the lunch mess – but just for a few minutes, before it gets covered again by the building on his back. Those moments are the only ones Harry’s body seems to be alive again, or at least, it feels something.   
Shoveling, melting and smashing the snow can kill you, in all senses – yet, there is something that attracts him there from the inside, as well as the awareness of being killed for non-attendance. 

Officer Malfois has a son, Draco – even if he never heard anyone calling him with his name. Most of the times he is called lord by the members of the servitude, or young man by his father’s colleagues. Indeed, he heard just once his name yelled by his father, the third day since he arrived there. He was melting snow right under the window of Draco’s room – looking up he could see the blue ceilings and the crystal chandeliers. Watching the Officer yelling at someone who was not a prisoner really confused him: at the beginning, he didn’t understand why he was screaming – he was on the other side of the path and when he got back in his place, he heard just this sentence. “Draco Lucius Malfoy! How many times do I have to tell you that this window must be closed?”  
So, now Harry was aware of two things: the boy’s name and the reason why he had never seen that window open. Apparently, the Officer Malfois didn’t want his son to share the same air with him or with any other prisoner.   
Today, while he is trying to melt a piece of ice with his hands, he can’t help but think of how strange and beautiful it was looking up and seeing Draco’s eyes on the other side of the glass. They were the same color of the ice, the color that used to fill his days and nightmares.   
The day after the fight with his father, Draco did not open the window at all, not even for a few minutes – but he spent the entire day in front of it reading. Harry hadn’t noticed him – there was some kind of desk in front of the window where Draco spent most of his time reading or writing – until he felt observed.   
That’s why he looked up and stared at his face for a few seconds that felt like eternity – ignoring one of the main rules of the camp, “never look straight in the eye someone that is not your equal.”  
It had never happened before – indeed, Harry was not sure at all that Draco knew about him. Now, on the eleventh day since he arrived there – he was sure of it. 

It’s 10 am and he's bent in front of the building, trying to tell the ice – that must be melt with bare hands – from the snow – that can be just moved and smashed on the other side of the path. It’s one of those days when his minds think about what happens around him with calm, analyzing people moving and the expressions of prisoners ans SS: he does not need too much strength to distract his mind from the misery he lives in – analyzing and trying to understand are enough for today.   
At 10.15 am, he finally finishes melting that pieace of ice that he held for the last fifteen minutes: it’s not so big, not bigger than his hand, but the chilbains don’t make him work as fast as the week before.   
Suddenly, while he stands up again and starts carrying a big amount of snow, a soft sound catches his attention. He could recognize it everywhere at anytime: something just hit the snow.   
The SS just started their patrol and won’t be back before fifteen minutes: knowing that no one can see him, Harry puts down the snow and gets closer to the window. During those moments his mind tries to imagine what kind of thing could make that sound: it cannot be a stalactite, or the sound would be like ice breaking, but it cannot be snow either – it does not sound so thud, it just crashes in thousand of pieces. While he is getting closer, he notices that Draco’s window is open and some kind of circular thing is lying on the snow right under it.   
With a little bit of commitment he can move his fingers and catch what seems to be a tinfoil casing, handmade for sure. Harry does not understand and he’d really like to look for Draco’s eyes but he knows perfectly that when the window is open, the guy does not dare to come near it.   
The mysterious object is a little piece of chocolate, covered in a hurry with some silver paper and a note.

Hide and burn the paper as soon as you get in the barrack or they’ll think you stole it and they’ll get to me. D.

The surprise he feels right now is so overwhelming he can’t think anymore, so he just eats the chocolate and hide the note in his pocket – he’ll burn it in the little stove that’s supposed to warm up their sixty doom mates in his Block.   
That night, Harry cannot close his eyes for a single moment – not because he is wondering about the reason of that deed, more because he does not understand the deed itself. It’s his thirteenth month in Dachau – and that’s another thing the camp can do to you. Harry couldn’t remember what it felt like to receive a kindness or, in fact, what a kindness was.   
The chocolates keep on being sent every day, right at 10.15 am, but no note. Sometimes Draco just throws the chocolate out his windows, in rare occasions he manages to send bread slices and a pair gloves. He perfectly knows he’ll never have a chance to see Harry wearing them – it is against the rule, wearing clothes not given from the SS – but he trusts his good sense to wear them at night, in the barrack.   
Draco does not know what he is doing and does not know why: the only thing he is sure of is what his behavior could bring him. He could be accused of betray to the Reich and being shot to death – even if, of course, being a Malfois still means something, so he probably would just be sent to fight the war.  
His are invisible deeds, they only take a few minutes of his days – his hands shiver thinking of being caught – but he just can’t help it.   
That guy is just his age and he melts snow with his hands – thinking about it makes duobts grow and grow in him. In the end, he remembers that this is Hitler’s will, the only man that can raise Germany after the suffering and pain of the World War. He just does not think about what is right and what is wrong: he is just focused on what he feels and the best way to calm his restless soul without being shot. He even found a way to look at the guy without him noticing – he just put a mirror over the window and if he kneels in from the his desk, he can almost ever see Harry’s reflection. This way he can see his reactions.   
He has a nice smile, Draco noticed it from the very first day – even if nothing can be compared the expression he had when he found the gloves.   
That guy has a nice smile and he is a pink triangle: he lives in a camp, you can see his bones under his skin but he still knows how to smile and feel surprise.  
Drace feels like he has a lot in common with that prisoner: he should have a pink triangle on his chest, but his smile would never be like Harry’s.


End file.
